David Lean was the Great White Hope of postwar British cinema.
In Which We Serve
, which Lean co-directed with Noël Coward, was

Great Expectations

the most popular British film of the war years, and
Brief Encounter
was seen by the critics as a breakthrough into serious adult
realism— though working-class audiences found Celia Johnson and
Trevor Howard's over-delicate sensibilities hard to comprehend.
Great Expectations
had a wider appeal. Richard Winnington, one of the most perceptive 1940s
film critics, claimed it as "the first
big
British film to be made, a film that confidently sweeps our cloistered
virtues into the open, it casts a complete spell derived from some inner
power."

The film was a commercial success in Britain and America (so successful
that Lean couldn't resist following it up with
Oliver Twist
), and it still stands out as one of the finest of all film adaptations of
Dickens. John Bryan's art direction avoids the trap so many
designers fall into of striving so hard to recreate authentic period
detail that Dickens's richly imaginative world is lost amidst too
solid and realistic sets. Bryan, in cooperation with the brilliant
cinematographer Guy Green, succeeds in creating an evocative atmosphere
which gives the film much of its power and resonance.

Lean, a showman as well as an artist, talks about the need to gain the
attention of audiences with a dramatic opening sequence. In
Great Expectations
he succeeds almost too well: the evocation of the bleak East Kent marshes
and Pip's nightmarish encounter with Magwitch in the churchyard
sets such a standard of excitement that what follows is almost an
anti-climax. It is to his credit, then, that he succeeds in moulding
Dickens's rambling novel into a satisfying dramatic shape. Minor
characters are sacrificed, but Finlay Currie's Magwitch, Martita
Hunt's Miss Havisham, Bernard Miles's Joe Gargery, and
Francis L. Sullivan's Jaggers are splendid creations against which
all subsequent incarnations have to be measured. In comparison, John
Mills's Pip is disappointingly colourless, and the metamorphosis of
Estella from Jean Simmons to Valerie Hobson destroys the aura which
surrounds her in the first half of the film.

Lean's interpretation of Dickens, like Olivier's
interpretation of Shakespeare, is inevitably timebound. There will always
be alternative ways of interpreting
Great Expectations
or
Henry V
, while a reinterpretation of Noël Coward's slight play
which Lean transformed into
Brief Encounter
could only be a remake of the film.

Thus, where
Brief Encounter
's limitations—the prissiness of the lovers'
attitudes to sex, the syrupy ending—seem movingly evocative of a
lost age,
Great Expectations
's weaknesses—its lapses into whimsicality, the predominance
of upper-middle-class accents— seem correctable faults. That said,
no other film or television adaptation of
Great Expectations
has managed to achieve anything like the
dramatic intensity and visual richness of Lean's film. Magwitch
appearing like a terrifying apparition in the windswept churchyard; Miss
Havisham and Estella in their eerie, cobweb-strewn mansion; the journey
out to the riverside inn and the disastrous rendezvous with the packet
steamer—these are so memorably filmed as to haunt the imagination
for years afterwards.